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SF Commander rejects TNA allegations

2013 Nov 05

By Franklin R. Satyapalan

Jaffna Security Forces Commander Maj. Gen. Mahinda Hathurusinghe yesterday rejected allegations that the Military had bulldozed houses belonging to Tamil people in the Valikamam North, especially in the Punnalaikattuvan North area and were constructing houses for Security Forces personnel.

The SF commander was responding to news reports, emanating from the Jaffna Peninsula that the Security Forces personnel were continuing to forcibly demolish houses of Tamils, disobeying a directive from President Mahinda Rajapaksa last week not to do so. The SF commander admitted that the President had inquired from him following the Leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Parliamentarian R. Sampanthan’s allegation that the security forces personnel were demolishing houses. "I informed the President that no such action had been taken in the Jaffna Peninsula and the TNA Leader was carrying out a campaign to tarnish the image of the security forces. We are only putting up new camps inside the Palali Military Cantonment."

Maj. Gen. denied any knowledge of the summoning or the reason for the heads of all the Divisional Secretariats, coming under the Jaffna Secretariat, along with other senior officials, to be present in Anuradhapura on Wednesday (6) for a meeting convened by the Land Acquisition Office of the Jaffna District.

Maj. Gen. Hathurusinghe said that certain Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarians and the media in Jaffna were making a lot of noise about baseless allegations against the military.

All that the military had done was to remove many mini camps spread all over the Jaffna Peninsula and setting up camps inside the main military cantonment at Palali in the Jaffna Peninsula.

Meanwhile, there was an editorial in a Tamil national newspaper yesterday on the demolition of houses of Tamils in the Valikamam North area under the heading, "Are the President’s directives being disobeyed". The editorial said that Tamil people, living in an ancestral Tamil village, Tennaimaravady, in the Eastern Province, feared that similar attempts were being made by the Mahaweli Authority to annex that village to Padaviya Sri Pura.

The Centre for Human Rights and Research (CHR) Sri Lanka, www.chrsrilanka.com the sister organization of Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE) www.caffe.lk, was established in 2010 in a bid to address the growing human rights concerns in the country and to educate the people about issues which have been neglected by the main stream media or civil society groups for various reasons. In addition to our continuous work with CSOs and human rights activism, in the past four years we have studied, spoken about and published greatly on Freedom of Information, Academic Freedom, and the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).